MAY 2012
TESTIMONY OF A FORMER PROTESTANT (EPISCOPALIAN)–41
Episcopal convert: R. R. Reno
By R. R. Reno,August 23, 2011
On a Saturday in mid-September of last year, the feast day of St. Robert Bellarmine, I was received into the Catholic Church. I pledged to believe and profess all that the Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God. The priest anointed me with the oil of confirmation. I exchanged the sign of peace with gathered friends and, after long months of preparation, I received the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Martyrs' Chapel of St. John's Church on the CreightonUniversity campus was not where I had expected to be on that day. Three years before, I had written In the Ruins of the Church, which was a kind of manifesto against such a move from Canterbury to Rome. That book diagnosed the pathologies of my former denomination, acknowledging that it had become a smugly self-satisfied member of the liberal Protestant club. Yet I argued with equal vigor that Episcopalians should stay put and endure the diminishments of Christianity in our time. I claimed that the disordered state of the Episcopal Church had not led me to despair. I criticized the habits of evasion and strategies of escape that seemed to promise refuge in some other church, and I proposed instead the vocation of dwelling amidst the ruins.
Publication creates accountability. Hearing of my departure from the Episcopal Church, a close friend wrote a strongly worded letter reminding me of my arguments for staying put. He cited my own words against me. "I reject our desire for a liberating distance," I had written. "Our vocation is to dwell within the ruins of the Church," I had said. And again, "We need to see that in Christ we are not called to love strength and power and beauty. Ruins are not unfit for human habitation."
These words, my friend reminded me, had been read and remembered; they had led people to accept ordination or undertake new responsibilities in the Episcopal Church and in other decaying mainline denominations. Moreover, these ordination vows and new responsibilities naturally created bonds of obligation that now stood in the way of precisely the move I had made. What, my friend wanted to know, had changed since I wrote In the Ruins of the Church? Why did I opt for departure rather than staying put? Do I now think that those who continue to fight for orthodoxy in mainline Protestantism are on a fool's errand?
His questions were difficult. What had changed? A few days after my reception into the Catholic Church, a colleague at Creighton who knows my attraction to dogmatic hyperbole took particular pleasure in observing, "My, my, you look ontologically different." Kidding aside, he was certainly right on one level. I have changed. I once tried to forge a vocation of faithfulness as a loyal member of a liberal Protestant denomination. Now I am a member of the Catholic Church. I changed—I made a change. I do not think I changed my mind about theology or ecclesiology or the fate of Christianity in the modern world. I suppose that, in the end, I changed my mind about myself. All the major premises of my argument stayed the same, but the minor premises changed, and with them the conclusion.
To a great extent, I would like to think my arguments for staying put were Augustinian. In his Confessions, St. Augustine tells the tale of his search for God. As a young man he went to Carthage much as young men and women go off to college in our time. He tells of his lustful desires, his "filth of concupiscence" and "excessive vanity," but he seems to have been the kind of student most professors would love to have. In what we might call his freshman year, he read Cicero's celebration of philosophy, and the effect was immediate. "I longed," he recalls, "for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardor in my heart."
When I read the Confessions in my own freshman year, I assumed that this great awakening marked the beginning of St. Augustine's spiritual journey. Of course, there were many byways and dead-ends. He fell in with the Manicheans. Worldly ambition and sexual desire deflected him from the true path. Nonetheless, I was convinced that the journey began with a conversion to the love of wisdom; for me, the Confessions was about how Augustine had patiently followed the difficult path toward the true answer to the perennial religious question.
We tend to see what we want to see in the books we read. Our culture is one of leave-taking and it champions the seeker as the hero of the spiritual life. We think that we must brave arid deserts and snowy mountain passes on our quest for God.
Recall Kierkegaard's leap of faith, William James' will to believe, and Paul Tillich's courage to be. Having read Sartre's hot rhetoric of existential choice and Heidegger's cooler image of the heroic modern man patiently walking the meadows of our disenchanted culture as a shepherd of Being, I came to believe that truth and holiness, like elves and unicorns, had been veiled and hidden in distant realms and secret forests. It was our vocation to energize our souls and get on with the search. Or so I imagined.
After many rereadings of the Confessions, I have been mortified to discover that St. Augustine does not commend the great preoccupation of modern Christianity, the quest for faith. For him, the journey of his young adulthood was a futile circular movement. Imagining himself to be a seeker after God, he was in fact ever returning to himself. What began as a projected heroic journey ended in exhausted despair. Ten years after Cicero had ignited in him a love of wisdom, St. Augustine reports, "I had lost all hope of discovering the truth." What seemed like a journey was nothing more than the huffing and puffing of a presumptuous soul that thought it could storm the citadel of God with earnest longing and good intentions. The upshot was paralysis, and as his story unfolds, St. Augustine adverts more and more to themes of bondage ("the chain of sexual desire" and "the slavery of worldly affairs"), crushing weight and exhaustion ("the burden of the world weighed me down with a sweet drowsiness"), and the irresolvable conflict of a divided will ("the agony of hesitation"). When one reads what Augustine actually wrote rather than what one imagines he must have written, the warning is clear. What had seemed a great and noble journey—to find God!—was, says Augustine, a series of delays and postponements. He had not struggled across spiritual deserts, nor had he climbed snowy mountain passes. By his own accounting, Augustine had spun endlessly, "turning over and over again," exhausting himself on "the treadmill of habit."
When I finally got my mind around the logic of Augustine's story, I was chastened. We live in a world of spiritual confusion no less disorienting than St. Augustine's. We certainly have many Carthages hissing with cauldrons of illicit loves. Just flip through the cable channels in the evening. We have Peter Singer at Princeton, a present-day spokesman for our present-day Manicheans and their crazy rationalism. I have been to Boulder, Colorado, and visited the shops that sell Tibetan prayer flags and audio CDs that promise to teach us how to achieve wholeness. Even where I live, in Omaha, Nebraska, fully surrounded by a great sea of "red states," the bookstores are well stocked with light reading for every seeker imaginable. Can we navigate through this jungle of spiritual choices? Augustine's story is a warning. Beware launching out on a search for God, for as Augustine asks, "What am I to myself but a guide to my own self-destruction?"
The flora of the present-day cultural environment is not limited to pre- and post- and non-Christian species. First Presbyterian sits hard by Second Baptist. Saint Leo's Catholic Church is down the street from All Saints' Episcopal. River of Life Community Church has its advertisement in the Saturday paper, along with Pacific Hills Lutheran and Sunny Slope Christian and the VineyardChurch and countless others. What are we to do in this jungle of denominationalism? Are we sinful men and women equipped to embark on a project of deciding which churches are best? When church becomes a choice, will we not guide ourselves to our own self-destruction?
No doubt many will object that this is a purely negative reason for staying put; they will say it is a kind of paralysis caused by the excessively pessimistic assumption that capacities for spiritual discernment are entirely corrupted by original sin. I consider myself Augustinian, so I affirm (if that is the word) the corruption. Wherever we are—dabbling in New Age spirituality, cultivating a despairing scientific materialism, attending the local FoursquareChurch—we may become acutely aware of what we are not finding, but we lack the capacity to get up and start walking in the right direction.
Still, our inability is not a condemnation to stasis. There is a journey of faith for Augustine, but the guidance comes from God, not us. Far from finding God, Augustine confesses, "You pierced my heart with the arrow of your love." Indeed, the arrows had already been loosed many times, but in his agitated desire to control his own destiny, Augustine had dodged and deflected them. Only after Augustine has recognized the vanity of his own efforts does the arrow of divine love strike its mark. In the silence of the garden, God's Word finally reaches his heart. "The examples given by your servants," Augustine reports, "burnt away and destroyed my heavy sluggishness." Then and only then does his journey begin: to baptism, back to Africa, and to Hippo.
The general principle of Augustine's own self-analysis is clear, and its relevance to the temptation to embark on our own searches for God is direct—even, and perhaps especially, when that search takes us across the strange terrain of denominationalism. "The soul needs to be enlightened," he writes, "by light from outside itself."
For the great Augustinian tradition of Western Christianity, the "outsideness" of divine light has been expressed in the principle of salvation sola gratia, salvation by grace alone. The ever-practical St.Benedict translated this spiritual insight into the vow of stability. The sinful soul will twist and turn to elude God's grasp, and for monks, this is manifest in the all-too-human tendency to wander from place to place in an effort to find a congenial community and a sympathetic abbot. For St. Benedict, this tendency is understandable. Who wants to endure the spiritual mediocrity of a less-than-ideal monastery, and who wants to be subjected to a less than saintly abbot? Yet, as St. Benedict realized, what is humanly understandable may be spiritually disastrous. For who shall guide the monk on his spiritual journey from place to place? Whence comes the light that will enlighten the heart of the seeker? St. Augustine's warning—"What am I to myself but a guide to my own self-destruction?"—was very much on St. Benedict's mind when he made stability a key element of his rule.
But equally—or perhaps more—importantly, St. Benedict followed St. Augustine by insisting that the grace of God is real and concrete. The spiritual arrows of divine love take the form of real people, actual texts, and specific institutions, all providentially ordered by God to shape our lives. Grace comes to the monk in the unending round of daily prayer; in the ways in which living in the company of fallen men demand habits of faith, hope, and love; and in the voice of the abbot who, like the Word of God, cannot be avoided. For St. Benedict, the vow of stability, "staying put," is integral to the training of the soul. One must be still so that the divine surgeon can work his healing arts.
Love is patient, and a love of God cannot be always rushing off after clanging bells and clashing cymbals—or finely appointed churches with nice lists of doctrines that one finds agreeable.
Thus, staying put would seem a fundamental spiritual discipline if we are to renounce the fantasy that we fashion our own identities as followers of Christ. That is the work of the Holy Spirit, not ours. Our job is to be still so that we might be fashioned by grace. T. S. Eliot, an Augustinian Anglican after my own heart, insisted upon the spiritual imperative of stillness in the Four Quartets.
Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while
the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.
I have no intention of retreating into Cistercian silence, but in my argument for staying put, for trying to be a faithful Christian in our strange times without moving about from denomination to denomination, I tried to do justice to the Benedictine application of St. Augustine's basic insight. We must resist the world's restlessness. We must abstain from its movements so that God might move in us.
And yet I have not stayed put. I left the Episcopal Church and joined the Catholic Church. Why? Partly because I realized that I had turned my Augustinianism into an idea, a theory, a theology. But this is obscure, and to explain I must digress into the thought of another apostate Anglican.
John Henry Newman has long been one of my favorite writers. His ability to combine syllogism with sentiment is remarkable, and I have always been romanced by the long, cloistral, silver-veined sentences that give my students fits when I assign him. I well recall first reading Newman's Apologia in Hans Frei's class on modern theology at YaleDivinitySchool. Frei was at his twinkle-eyed, mysterious best when he asked us just what we thought of the famous "Note on Liberalism," in which Newman deliciously translated the anti-dogmatic spirit of the age he so disliked into eighteen pithy doctrines.
Newman was to me an accelerant. His observation (drawn from his study of the Arian controversy) that "the truth lay, not with the Via Media, but with what was called the 'extreme party'" struck me as a bracing correction to the sensible liberalism of my childhood and education. He endorsed the principle of dogma. "Religion as mere sentiment," he wrote with denunciatory directness, "is to me a dream and a mockery." He had no patience for vague fantasies of spiritual fellowship. Like Augustine, he saw no hope in seeking. The basis of the Christian life is not our longing; it is the "visible Church, with sacraments and rites which are channels of invisible grace." We cannot move through the spiritual life the way we drift through the marketplace. Dogma and the sacramental system must define and circumscribe our belief. If at the time I still retained remnants of Schleiermacher or Tillich (the heroes of my youth), after reading Newman I wished to be rid of them.
Thus, I wrote In the Ruins of the Church for a dual purpose. I wanted to advance Newman's criticisms of liberalism, criticisms I took to be aligned with the postliberal theologies of my graduate professors Hans Frei and George Lindbeck. Yet, precisely because I was convinced as much by Newman's catholicism as by his antiliberalism, I wanted to do so without standing at a distance from my own church. Dogma and the sacramental system are the foundation of life in God. They are his arrows of love. I had to stay put in order to avoid drifting off into the ether of mere sentiment or theory. I had to avoid making an idea or, worse, a theology the basis for my own thought and action. In the end, I failed, and I failed in a way that Newman recognized in his own Apologia.
Newman is excruciatingly detailed in his account of his own thinking, but for my purposes, I can simply report his conclusion: he came to think that the basic rationale for Anglicanism lacked validity. Even more strongly, he came to think that Anglicanism was a midwife for a liberalism that led to atheism. I still do not think Newman correct in the way he sets up Anglicanism, liberalism, and atheism as falling dominos, but I have come to think that the Episcopal Church is disastrously disordered and disarrayed. Here my own reasons and analysis are of no more moment than Newman's. What matters is the way one responds to the judgment that Anglicanism is in ruins.
As he looks back in his Apologia, Newman reports that the realization that his prior confidence in Anglicanism was mistaken did not produce an immediate conviction that he must leave. He developed a figural interpretation of his circumstances that justified staying put. "I am content," he wrote to a friend at the time, "to be with Moses in the desert, or with Elijah excommunicated from the Temple." When I wrote In the Ruins of the Church, I also adopted a figural strategy to make sense of my situation. I clearly saw that the apostolic inheritance bequeathed to the Episcopal Church—a liturgy more medieval than reformed, a veneration of the ancient creeds, a love of the Church Fathers, a scriptural piety that did not confuse being learned with being critical—was being dismantled by a revisionist ideology that knew no limits. But I did not see myself as a prophet who hectored at a distance.